He wore black shoes many sizes too large for him and tripped on the steps. The bells around their necks woke the daughter up.Ī boy no older than 12, dressed in a baggy blue uniform, showed them to their red brick cottage. A toddler wandered behind some knock-kneed goats, who, at the sound of the car, bumped against one another. A woman hanging laundry paused with a pair of green shorts in her hands. The dirt road twisted past hamlets, where men in sleeveless sweaters watched them from small yards. They remained quiet as they turned off the highway at a handwritten sign that said Crown Group 15 KM. The father felt like honking but didn’t, because his daughter had fallen asleep. “There,” she said: a series of red brick buildings peeking through the trees. Then the tires caught, and they started uphill again. The car slid back a foot and all three of them felt a simultaneous burst of terror. The daughter shut the door and the father released the hand brake. You can drink water as soon as we reach the resort.” To his daughter, he said, “Close the door, baby. Just stay in the car,” the father told the mother. He looked at his daughter with his hands still on the wheel. “I’ll get the water bottle from the back.” The taste was so vile that she threw up again. The girl flung the door open, leaned out, and threw up her breakfast. When she saw the daughter’s face, she became alert. But her father was concentrating on driving and her mother had her eyes closed. On another hairpin turn, her stomach heaved. She dropped her head to her chest as if to avoid the colossal weight. The daughter suddenly had the impression of it collapsing and burying the car under a million tons of dirt. The hillside loomed on their right, a dark-red wall. The father would have to yank the wheel sharply to avoid it. From time to time, a tourist bus speeding downhill would block nearly the entire road. Later, when they got higher and the roads got narrower, he fell silent, too. “Hoooold on!” he would yell, while the mother and daughter remained silent. Each time they navigated one, the father would list theatrically to the side. S uddenly there were hairpin turns, signaled by yellow signs with curved black arrows. His mustache obscured his upper lip, his left ear. Where she was sitting, she could see his smooth cheek. The fact of the pad, the intimacy of being alone with her mother inside the bathroom, all of it had created a new distance from her father. Streaks of pain were shooting low in her belly, but she did not want to bring it up in the car. Now she reached beneath her book and pressed the new thickness. The girl had found walking with the pad uncomfortable but said nothing. She removed a Kotex pack from the cabinet and explained how to affix the thick pad to her underwear. Her mother had steered her by the shoulders into the bathroom, where the mirror was still fogged from whoever had last taken a bath. She was 11 years old and had started bleeding for the first time that morning. The tangled cord of its earphones shivered with the motion of the car. She hated car journeys, though she looked forward to being at the resort, where, she knew from previous visits, there would be table tennis, long walks, and a sweet white rabbit in a hutch. In the back seat, their daughter was trying to read. The vegetation on the slopes looked darker than the shrubs and trees dotting the plains. The first sight of the hills always agitated her, their peaks swaddled in gray-and-purple shadow. The mother, sitting next to him, drummed her fingers on her thighs. The past three summers, around the time when the heat in the city grew fangs, he’d taken his family to Crown Resorts, nestled in the tea plantations of Kodaikanal, a hill station some 500 kilometers outside Bangalore. At 39 years old, he had recently been promoted to bank-branch manager. The fingertips of his left hand guided the steering wheel, exerting the mildest pressure, letting the car do the rest. He had recently bought a white Maruti Zen. The father switched off the air conditioner and rolled down his window. It wasn’t until the family in the car saw the first wisp of cloud hanging over the hillside that they felt they had finally broken free. Now there were bungalows and shops that clung to both sides of the highway roadside tea stalls with corrugated roofs, where truck drivers stopped to stretch their legs bustling townships that only a few years ago had been villages of mud huts, their walls covered with circular cowpats new tollbooths, petrol bunks, and hotels promising hot water and clean rooms. T hey had been driving for hours, and the city still hadn’t loosened its grimy hold.
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